Patches no; they are as safe as injections. (My endocrinologist prefers them for this reason.) Basically, any hormones you swallow have to go through your digestive system and a "first pass" through the liver before it reaches the bloodstream. Any medication which goes directly into the bloodstream (patches, injections, creams/gels, sublingual pills, etc.) skips this first pass and is therefore safer for the liver, which will only have to filter out the *leftover* drug after the body has used what it needed. Some forms of HRT pills are even worse than that; the drug as swallowed *cannot* be used by the body, and the first pass is required to break it down into a usable form.
It also allows for lower dosages than pills, because anything swallowed also has to be in an amount sufficient to allow the liver to remove a lot of it and still have an effective dose left.
Quite honestly, I would not trust an MD who believed otherwise. (But your therapist may not be an MD, and may just be confused.)
